The new land owners sought to contain encroachment through selectively authorising access by leasing portions of land to unofficial claimants. Leasing was a significant practice that both reinforced and undermined private property relations and the spatial practices that accompanied them. In some cases it permitted the land owners to benefit financially from the land and to retain the land unit as a commodity with a value. However, leasing was not part of the formal plans and was a compromise in the face of external demands and unofficial claims on the land, resulting in the narrowing of land owners’ exclusive rights. Land owners were forced to concede ground by allowing leases of the land, against their own plans, in order to contain and control alternative claims and the representations of space inherent in them. This occurred after restitution, revealing a more negotiated process of rights and access to the land than envisaged in the restitution process, which saw private ownership of the land
unambiguously being transferred to groups with a clearly defined membership for their exclusive use.
There is evidence that rentals leading to individualisation of land is increasingly occurring in indigenous tenure systems (Chimhowu and Woodhouse, 2006). This signifies the hybridity of living tenure systems as indigenous and private systems interact with one another over time (Cotula, 2007, Cousins, 2008b). It also signifies the encroachment of norms of private property into indigenous tenure systems. At its base, land rental or leasing generates private property relations by formalising land as a marketable commodity that produces unequal relations of power between owners and tenants.
Land leasing had a long history in the area, starting in the early twentieth century with rent farming. For example, Mrs Cooksley, who owned nine farms including Vleyfontein and Zwartfontein, earned most of her income from rent farming in the early part of last century (Mulaudzi, 2000:231). Rents played an important role in the process of commodifying land through linking the amount of rent to be paid to the quality of land and the proximity to water and markets (South African Native Affairs Commission, 1905:29), which started to place a value on the land in relation to its commercial potential. White farmers leased these farms between themselves for the whole period up to the state expropriations in the 1970s.166 Even after expropriation the state continued leasing the farms, to the Hennings, to Schoeman at Syferfontein, and to others.
Leasing was always a way of keeping a white presence on the land, even when land owners were unable to utilise the land productively themselves, and of generating income from the land without having to invest too much in the land. This constant occupation was important historically in the process of moving from occupation to title deed, and in the conversion of the land into a commodity. Leasing is built into the conception of private property and the parcelling of space. Owners lease land to and control tenants; and people will usually only lease for production if they calculate that it is commercially viable to do so. However, after restitution the character of leasing changed. There were some attempts to reproduce past spatial arrangements on the farms, especially at Mavungeni where the Hennings proposed the 25 year lease of the land under their authority, discussed in Chapter 5. Embedded in the argument against that agreement was that the purpose of restitution was first and foremost to
166 Interview, Arthur Henning, 17 November 2008
allow people to return to their land, regardless of what the land may have been used for or how it might be used economically in future.
The Henning lease proposal was a spark that surfaced differing conceptions of what return to the land meant and the way space was to be organised. The Xikopokopo occupation, discussed in Chapter 5, altered spatial practices considerably. Most of the outsiders who participated in the occupation claimed to believe that Shirinda was the lawful authority of the land.167 Land owners’ control over the property was destabilised, as were representations that sought to present the space as an unsullied commercial farm, as Chapter 7 shows. While these practices could still co-exist, the occupation restructured spatial practices that effectively limited the reproduction of a commercial farm as envisaged in dominant representations of the space.
Land that was designated for grazing and tourism at Mavungeni was reconstructed as land for settlement and homestead production. A portion of the farm was cut off from the authorised owners’ control and exploitation.
The scale and length of the Hennings’ proposed lease was a factor in its abandonment, as it sought to capture the entire space and reproduce old spatial arrangements on it. But the CPA committee agreed to other, smaller, leases. Many of these were forced on the committee out of necessity, in an attempt to contain a proliferation of land occupations and uses outside their control. Vleifontein residents used Mavungeni land for cropping and grazing prior to the settlement of the restitution claims. Residents from Maila had used the redistribution portion.
In order to keep this under control, the committee made concessions to allow the continued use of the land on the basis of rentals:
“All people from Vleifontein were doing grazing here. We cannot blame them. It was before we claimed and they did not know that it belonged to some other community. They thought maybe it was no-man’s land, because AgriVen came and used this farm for many years also… They can come and lease here, no problem. A portion for grazing, no problem. But we cannot sell these portions. We are not allowed. Only to lease so that the community may get something.”168
There were also attempts to charge for natural resource harvesting, a historical spatial practice of residents of Vleifontein, Maila and even Elim. However, at times the new owners felt that
167 Interviews with Nyamukhamadi Nemanashe, 7 June 2009; Mike Malehase, 10 June 2009; Jonas Pulwana, 10 February 2010; Livhuwani Makhuga, 10 February 2010; Mabina Matodzi, 10 February 2010
168 Interview, David Baloyi, 2 June 2009
their ownership rights might begin disintegrating should they allow non-owners to continue using the natural resources:
“It’s only people from Elim and Riverplaats down here giving us lots of problem for fishing. But we used to chase them and say no, you are not allowed. Otherwise you must get permission, give some little compensation to the community that you can come and fish here. Not just to get in here and fish. It’s like hunting. Why can we allow each and every one to come and hunt here? Because we’ve got a problem with this veld fire. These hunters come and burn the farm. Sometimes it goes up to the orchard, it’s a problem. We don’t allow them to fish and hunt.”169
Efforts to contain the non-commodified, or at least controlled, use of natural resources did not always succeed. At Shimange, the CPA’s institutions were too weak to enforce demands for rent. Residents from Maila entered the farm to gather firewood, as they had previously done.
Initially they were charged a fee but, because of accountability problems (who was to collect the money and what was to happen to it), this payment system collapsed and gathering of natural resources reverted to open access.170
Although the allocation of stands and payment to the traditional authorities for this allocation was not entirely the same as leasing of land, there were similarities. As with the Xikopokopo group at Mavungeni, at Munzhedzi the chief-designate was not authorised to allocate land.
Chapter 5 shows that the money he received for allocations was not channelled to the legally-recognised land owners, the CPA. But the CPA committee struggled to challenge this, in large part because the late chief who had led the claim and pre-emptive occupation began allocating stands with the consent of the rest of the CPA committee from 2000. The late chief explicitly invited non-claimants to join the occupation and non-claimants eventually vastly outnumbered claimants. Later, stands were allocated to those who requested them even if they were not claimants, even by the chief-designate. Aliber et al. (2009b:67) provided evidence of this, showing that new non-claimant households settling at Munzhedzi increased by 80 or more until 2008, and only then did the numbers drop off. The chief-designate’s allocation of stands without CPA committee approval signified a direct challenge to the exclusive rights of property owners in the same way as Shirinda’s unauthorised allocation of stands at Mavungeni did. In both cases, however, the contestation was less about whether property owners should have exclusive rights to shape spatial practice, and more about who should have the authority to do
169 Interview, David Baloyi, 2 June 2009
170 Informal discussion, Rosemary Tiba Baloyi, 25 August 2009
so. Therefore, challenges to these exclusive rights themselves remained contained within the framework of private property.
Land leasing was therefore used by land owners in an attempt to limit and control encroachment both on their land and on their rights to exclusive use. Land owners sought to secure dominant representations of space against alternative spatial practices that emerged from the lived space on and around the farms. However in doing so, they conceded some of their rights to exclusive use of the land and to maintain fixed boundaries, resulting in the adaptation of both representations of space and spatial practices. By posing a direct challenge to their authority, unauthorised leasing by inhabitants took this one step further by openly challenging the rights of land owners to exclusive use and maintenance of fixed boundaries.
These challenges thus threatened to undermine the fundamental basis of the dominant representations of space and hence their materialisation in spatial practice. Even though land reform was built on the basis of private property, inhabitants did not passively accept this.
6.5 Conclusion
In the Vleifontein area, land reform was initiated in the context of the layers of sedimented practices shown in Chapter 4. Land reform drew on the exclusive property rights in fragmented spaces where boundaries were sharply defined. This established the basic framework of land reform, imposed at a national level. But it also drew on aspects of pre-colonial, indigenous tenure systems. In particular, notions of collective land control and nested rights accompanied ideas about boundary flexibility. Added to these representations of space, the reality of Vleifontein as an essentially urban settlement in the middle of the farms added the dynamic of the urban-rural frontier (Cross et al., 1998), which was contested in discourse (i.e. as a representation) as well as in practice. Lived space changed significantly for many inhabitants as a result. Claimants who moved back onto the farm became owners with exclusive rights, where historically they were subordinate and the few rights they had were constantly being squeezed. The dominant representations of space were materialised in spatial practices that took the cadastral boundaries seriously and physically marshalled these boundaries to secure exclusive rights to use the land of the new owners. For Vleifontein residents, restitution for others meant the shock of suddenly losing whatever land access they had enjoyed in the area, as compensation for their forced removal.
These representations of space, and changes to lived space, underpinned the creation, in spatial practice, of hybridised property relations. This was similar to process elsewhere in the country (Kingwill, 2008), and indicated processes of fusion and mutual encroachment between indigenous and private tenure regimes. Land reform opened possibilities for contestation over land control and boundary definition alike. Dominant spatial practices based on securing clearly-defined boundaries between fragmented spaces, and on asserting exclusive control over access and use of land, were contested in practice. Although alternative or subordinate representations of space were not clearly articulated, they became visible through everyday contestations both of the boundaries which defined private properties in relation to one another, and of the exercise of exclusive rights of ownership. While relative elites, as Chapter 5 shows, had the advantage in defining boundaries and manifesting exclusive property rights in practice, inhabitants who found themselves subordinated to these elites held their own and their practical activity played a significant role, both in mediating exclusive rights and (in some instances) in creating more flexible and negotiated boundaries. Numerous transgressions practically shaped the production of space in ways that differed from what went before and from the dominant representations of space. In the face of weak institutions of ownership and limited practical regulation of property rights by the state, there were some encroachments on boundaries - both benignly but also more deliberately and aggressively - that put pressure on the discrete parcels of land and blurred the boundaries between properties.
Encroachments that dissolved or threatened to dissolve boundaries between discrete parcels of land signalled that the new land owners (or the, CPA committees, the institutions that represented them) did not have full control over their property. They were unable to retain the integrity of their land as a distinct parcel separate from other spaces both as a physical entity and as a space for defined land uses. The private property rights to exclusive use were thus narrowed in practice, in the face of widespread alternative claims and actions. Likewise, the spatial conceptions of privately-owned productive land for agriculture were limited both conceptually and in practice as it was transformed through these alternative claims and actions. These contestations over the boundaries of property and over the exclusive rights of private ownership, which were central both to representations of space and to its maintenance within a structured private property regime, had significant implications for the way space could and would be organised, as Chapter 7 shows.
The hybridised forms of property that were heightened by the land reform programme raise questions about the adequacy of a conceptual framework based on the dichotomy of private
versus collective property. Conceptual binaries of this nature are often rooted in practical, real world oppositions and cannot be dismissed out of hand. For example, in the South African situation distinct tenure regimes, from the angles both of ownership and control over land and property, are manifested in the real world. These concepts can highlight key distinctions between different systems of tenure. Yet the application of conceptual binaries, if used too crudely, can also efface the more subtle complexities that lead to the practical intertwining of systems of tenure, creating an uneven blend, almost like dye injected into water. They may still retain their distinctiveness, but the edges blend into one another.
The research site is located precisely on an ‘edge’ in spatial terms with regard to property relations (as well as systems of authority, as Chapter 5 shows, and land uses, as Chapter 7 shows). This spatial location must necessarily produce conceptual adaptations. If private property is defined primarily by the rigidity of its boundaries and the exclusivity of the rights it confers on owners, land restitution as it has unfolded in practice on these farms has brought the features into question. Restitution in practice has forced a blurring of boundaries between fragmented parcels of land. Despite efforts to settle the question of land claims in favour of a clearly-defined group of owners, numerous counter-claims and spatial practices based on these claims have produced ongoing instability with regard to the exercise of exclusive rights of ownership. These practical responses to restitution combined with contradictions and tensions within the dominant representations of property in restitution thus raise fundamental questions about the character of property relations following land reform.